GAO Finds Tainted Food Served to School Kids

by: Jill Richardson

Tue Sep 22, 2009 at 15:34:59 PM PDT

The finding came from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which issued a report titled "School Meal Programs: Changes to Federal Agencies' Procedures Could Reduce Risk of School Children Consuming Recalled Food." I've included the executive summary of the report below, but here's the most important sentence in my mind: "During 3 recent recalls, FNS [USDA's Food and Nutrition Service, which oversees school lunch] notified states, but in only one case did it inform schools to hold and not serve suspect foods prior to an official recall of commodity products."

Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has already introduced a bill, The Safe Food for Schools Act, to implement the recommendations of the GAO report. My hope is that her bill - if it's a good one - can be passed as part of the upcoming food safety bill that the Senate HELP committee is already debating. Details are below.

The GAO report on Food and Nutrition Services (FNS) uncovered that food items the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) says are contaminated are not being pulled from school cafeterias. Important alerts of infected foods, such as salmonella-infected peanut butter that sickened nearly 700 people, have failed to reach schools.

To improve information sharing and protect school children from contaminated food, Senator Gillibrand introduced new legislation that would direct the USDA to:

• Develop guidelines in consultations with Agricultural Marketing Service and Farm Service Agency to help determine whether to institute an administrative hold on suspect commodities for school meal programs;

• Work with states to explore ways for states to speed notification to schools;

• Improve timelines and completeness of direct communication between FNS and schools about holds and recalls, such as through the commodity alert system;

• Take the lead among USDA agencies to establish a time frame in which it will improve the USDA commodity hold and recall procedures to address the role of processors and determine distributors' involvement with processed products, which may contain recalled ingredients, to provide faster and more comprehensive information to schools;

• Provide states with more specific instructions for schools to dispose of recalled commodities and obtain timely reimbursements;

• Institute a systematic quality check procedure to ensure FNS holds on foods and products used by schools are carried out effectively; and

• Direct the Food Service Inspection Service to revise its procedures to ensure that schools are included in effectiveness checks.

From the GAO report:

Despite its efforts, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), which oversees federal school meals programs, did not always ensure that states and schools received timely and complete notification about suspect food products provided to schools through the federal commodity program. The federal commodity program provides food to schools at no cost to the schools, and accounts for 15 to 20 percent of food served in school meals. During 3 recent recalls, FNS notified states, but in only one case did it inform schools to hold and not serve suspect foods prior to an official recall of commodity products. When a videotape aired by the media showed inhumane treatment of cattle at a plant that provided beef to the commodity programs, FNS told states to have schools stop serving the company's beef weeks before the official recall of commodity beef was announced. However, when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recalled suspect peanut products and canned vegetables in two other cases, FNS did not inform states and schools to hold and not serve the companies' commodity products until the recalls were expanded to include the companies' commodity products - weeks later. FNS's initial notification to states regarding recalls did not provide complete information on the full range of products affected. Instead, states and schools continued to receive information on multiple other recalled products over time. It sometimes took states and schools a week or more to determine what additional products were subject ot a recall, during wich time they unknowingly served affected products.

FNS provided instructions for the disposal and reimbursement of recalled products to states who, in turn, provided instructions to schools but, nonetheless, some schools experienced problems. Some schools reported to GAO problems in finding landfills that would accept large quantities of recalled products. Some schools also reported that reimbursement instructions were not clear, reimbursement was delayed for months, and that all of their expenses related to the recalls were not reimbursed.

Although both USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) and the FDA procedures direct them to conduct recall quality checks, neither included thousands of schools that had received recalled USDA-commodities products for the beef and peanut recalls because they thought FNS conducted these checks. As a result, they were unable to ensure that the recalls were being carried out effectively by schools. FNS officials said that they did not conduct any kind of systematic quality checks of schools receiving recalled commodities, because they relied on FSIS and FDA to conduct such checks. FDA did include schools in its canned vegetable recall audit checks, and some may have received recalled-commodity canned vegetables. However, because FDA does not systematically sample schools or analyze results of the quality checks for the group, the agency cannot be assured that the recall was carried out effectively in schools.